from Hacker News

I ported pigz from Unix to Windows

by speckx on 6/20/25, 12:47 PM with 32 comments

  • by igrunert on 6/23/25, 10:40 PM

    I recently ported WebKit's libpas memory allocator[1] to Windows, which used pthreads on the Linux and Darwin ports. Depending on what pthreads features you're using it's not that much code to shim to Windows APIs. It's around ~200 LOC[2] for WebKit's usage, which a lot smaller than pthread-win32.

    [1] https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/pull/41945 [2] https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/blob/main/Source/bmalloc/li...

  • by andy99 on 6/23/25, 11:08 PM

    I'm a big fan of pigz, I discovered it 6 years ago when I had some massive files I needed to zip and and 48 core server I was underutilizing. It was very satisfying to open htop and watch all the cores max out.

    Edit: found the screenshot https://imgur.com/a/w5fnXKS

  • by haunter on 6/23/25, 11:32 PM

  • by kjksf on 6/20/25, 1:00 PM

    Worth mentioning that this is only of interest as technical info on porting process.

    The port itself is very old and therefore very outdated.

  • by mid-kid on 6/24/25, 7:56 AM

    I'm not sure how willing I'd be to trust a pthread library fork from a single no-name github person. The mingw-w64 project provides libwinpthread, which you can download as source from their sourceforge, or as a binary+headers from a well-known repository like msys2.

  • by account42 on 6/24/25, 8:24 AM

    > Porting pthreads code to Windows would be a nightmare.

    Porting one application using pthreads to use the Win32 API directly is however a lot more reasonable and provides you more opportunity to deal with impedance mismatches than a full API shim has. Same goes for dirent and other things as well as for the reverse direction. Some slightly higher level abstraction for the thnings your program actually needs is usually a better solution for cross-platform applications than using one OS API and emulating it on other systems.

  • by themadsens on 6/23/25, 9:03 PM

    I wish premake could gain more traction. It is the comprehensible alternative to Cmake etc.

  • by kristianp on 6/23/25, 9:17 PM

  • by nialv7 on 6/24/25, 1:28 AM

    The best kind of porting - other people have already done most of the work for you!

  • by anilakar on 6/24/25, 6:54 AM

  • by jqpabc123 on 6/20/25, 1:03 PM

    This is clearly aimed at faster results in a single user desktop environment.

    In a threaded server type app where available processor cores are already being utilized, I don't see much real advantage in this --- if any.